


Purple, like Memory

by grainjew



Series: Home Again, Home Again [1]
Category: One Piece
Genre: Gen, Ohara (One Piece), Post-Canon, ancient tree headcanons, the headcanon is that they're redwoods
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-29
Updated: 2020-02-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 23:53:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22960516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grainjew/pseuds/grainjew
Summary: She leapt, and made wings of arms to ensure her safe landing. Fragments of rock and soil crunched under her feet, and Nami with her lantern hair stepped up next to her, and she was standing on Ohara.After Laugh Tale, Robin comes home.
Relationships: Mugiwara Kaizoku | Strawhat Pirates & Nico Robin
Series: Home Again, Home Again [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1650010
Comments: 32
Kudos: 163
Collections: Excellent Completed Gen & Platonic Fiction, Mugiwara_no_Pirates





	Purple, like Memory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [fallingwish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fallingwish/gifts).



> finally caught up to a year's worth of one piece chapters so you better believe i'll be writing nothing but pirates for the next forever... it's good to be back

The Thousand Sunny made its way to Ohara in a sort of eerie peace. Even now, twenty-three years later, it was an island of ghosts, and the superstitious sailors of West Blue did not dare approach: so they sailed undisturbed, flitting lightly across the waves as a petrel on the hunt.

The trip was a gift from Robin to Nami, a chance to map the now-unmapped and ensure the completion of her world atlas, and at the same time a gift from Nami to Robin, the resurrection of her home and a symbol for all the world to see that Robin had survived, that Ohara had survived, despite the entire world against her. And, too, a gift from Robin to Luffy, a new island to explore, and a gift from Luffy to Robin, a sort of closure he had discerned her need for in that sharp way of his.

After dinner — miso soup, mackerel, and a lavish tiramisu — Usopp shouted “Land!” 

The Sunny approached Ohara with the last dregs of dusk.

They dropped anchor at scattered, fractured underwater columns— all that remained of the docks. Robin stared at them as her crewmates leapt the distance to shore, watching the play of seaweed and wave, the glint of moon on dark water. The chatter of her crew. Her family, her home.

“Robin-chan? You coming?”

“In a moment,” she said, and didn’t look up. “Don’t wait for me.”

“You’re sure?” That was Brook, so concerned. So aware of what it meant, to lose everything in one night and be left with only ghosts and ashes. 

“I’ll be right down. Don’t worry about me.”

Luffy, at least, took that as his cue to go off exploring, and the rest of the voices followed his. It was kind of him, to wait for her. Normally he was gone before the Sunny had even docked.

Robin watched the sea, a little longer. The wind had stilled to a breeze, and the waves were minute things, dyed the colors of night. A fish leapt. 

It was so impossible to believe that she was really here. To believe that — for the first time in twenty-three long years of running — she had come home. That she could step up on Sunny’s railing, and jump the distance to the shore, and land with her feet on Ohara’s soil. That the island, unmarked for twenty-three years on every map, was despite that a solid thing, a real thing, a broken and battered and destroyed thing to be certain, but a thing that existed, and persisted, and stood. That the place she had kept alive only in her words and her memories so long was a place she could touch, if she wanted to, with her hands and with her feet and with her eyes. It was so impossible, to believe that. 

But Robin was a Straw Hat, and her captain, against all odds and against all the world, was King of the Pirates: the word _impossible_ had long ago been proven just another limit imposed by a world which had not yet met Luffy and his crew.

So Robin gathered her courage, and turned eyes to her childhood home. 

It was indistinct and deeply shadowed, rocks and bare crags and jutting shapes formed from shades of darkness. At the shore, Robin could make out Nami — she had stayed, she had waited. This crew was so much more than Robin deserved. 

She leapt, and made wings of arms to ensure her safe landing. Fragments of rock and soil crunched under her feet, and Nami with her lantern hair stepped up next to her, and she was standing on Ohara. 

She breathed. The island did not collapse under her feet. Gunshots did not sound; there was no cannonfire, no shouting people, no orders, no tears. The sea did not come rushing in, cold like ice, heaving and hungry and all-consuming. It smelled like birds, instead. It smelled like birds and wind and Nami’s tangerine soap. Not like what she remembered at all, but like something real, at least.

“Ohara,” whispered Robin, and the word was paper in her mouth. She looked up, towards the center of the island, towards the ashes of the Tree of Knowledge, towards a night-covered blur of shapes, and started walking.

She was surprised her feet remembered the path. Her steps were long and sure with memory two decades old, finding roads and turns that no longer existed. She let them. Her feet, at least, knew this as Ohara, as _her_ Ohara, and that was a comfort to her eyes, which could not recognize its silhouettes.

Nami said something, behind her. Robin couldn't make it out, but it sounded worried. Her crew really was too kind.

As she walked, twenty-three-year-old devastation etched itself in charcoal around her. The winds had scoured broken rock free of ash, until it scattered into the sea or collected in little cracks and hollows like kittiwakes nesting in cliffsides. Craters and jutting spears of bare stone were interspersed by massive chunks of blackened, splintering wood, from trees and the Tree but also from houses of people she'd known. Here and there, something glinted metallic from beneath turned and settled soil, jewels or stovepots or bicycles: remnants of Ohara's civilization.

 _An archaeologist's treasure trove,_ she thought, and then for the first time in her life hated herself for being an archaeologist.

Grasses grew wild under her feet. Everything had burned (or frozen— _Saul!_ ) in the Buster Call, but the winds and the animals and the tides must have carried seeds in the intervening years. 

Usopp was beside her, trying to get her attention. Nami was there too, face all worried, and the massive charred circle that had been the Tree of Knowledge was in front of her.

She turned to them, when she couldn’t bear to look anymore.

Usopp said, “Are you okay? You were…” He waved a hand all around, then looked horrified. “I’m sorry, obviously you’re not okay, that was terrible of me, I’m so sorry Robin—”

“Usopp wanted to show you something,” interrupted Nami. 

He took a step backwards. “I just thought, maybe— But don’t worry about it. You’re busy, don’t worry about it.”

Robin stared at him. He was wringing his hands and shifting his weight from foot to foot, eyes darting to the side. Nervous in the way he’d been, sometimes, after Enies Lobby, or when he said something tactless. Nervous also like Robin made him, when she let her imagination wander. Perhaps she was looking too intensely. Her crew was so easily unnerved sometimes. It was part of their charm, really.

“Show me,” she said. “I’m not…” She chanced another glance at the burnt husk of what had been the greatest repository of knowledge in the world. “I’m not busy, Usopp.”

He made a shaky smile at her. Reached for her hand, and she let him. 

They didn’t go far. Hardly a few hundred yards to the left of where she’d been standing, just out of sight, there was a patch of earth, and in that earth grew a small stand of trees. 

Usopp walked up to them. He placed a hand on the bark of one, and grabbed at a handful of branch to show her thin evergreen needles. The ground was littered with pinecones, and the trees were sturdy things for their youth, taller than any of her crewmates and imposing against the night. 

Trees, on Ohara. _Trees,_ on an island that burned and burned until the sky was grey with smoke and ash. Trees, strong and healthy, in a land whose Tree had had been murdered.

Trees had never been her specialty, but she'd read, once: _Some plants, like some people, grow only in adversity. And some trees sprout only after the most devastating wildfires._

Robin was crying, but Usopp didn’t mention it, and neither did Nami, caught up to them, or Brook and Jinbe, appearing out of the shadows. There was no weakness in crying, as a Straw Hat. There was only strength, and the knowledge that they would all die together or not at all. And Usopp was still holding her hand.

A gull cried, lonely. Ohara was a home for the birds, now, and the seaweed and the fish. If Robin hadn't lived here once, she would call it a fascinating case study in nature reclaiming a man-made environment. 

Instead she smiled, bitterly. Only humans feared Ohara's legacy. 

The trees were just fine. 

"They're redwoods," whispered Usopp, free hand tangled in the branches, smiling, in awe. "Was the Tree of Knowledge a redwood?"

Robin said, as though speaking too loudly would disturb Ohara's restless ghosts: "It must have been."

“We should take a sapling on Sunny,” said Nami. “Plant it next to my tangerines, so Ohara will always be with us.”

Too kind. They were too kind.

"Yohohoho! That sounds like a marvelous idea! What do you think, Robin-san?"

Robin looked at the patterns of the bark, instead of at the others. The moonlight cut thin slices between deep green needles. Everything was in stark focus, even the bed of pinecones and fallen branches under her feet, even the sound of her crewmates' breathing, even Usopp's hand in hers, clammy from cold and disquiet.

A small breeze hissed and moaned, and Usopp shivered.

Franky arrived, his steps heavy, Chopper on his shoulder, and then Sanji, restraining himself, and then Zoro, from the wrong direction.

They were all here. Her crew. Her family. Except Luffy, who would arrive on his own time: but she wasn't worried, because her captain knew time and time again exactly what she needed.

She brushed the bark of the redwood with her spare hand, to feel the roughness and realness and unburnedness of it. In her mind, Ohara crackled with unending flame. In her mind, Ohara screamed, Ohara died.

“The Tree. I have to—” said Robin. She whipped her body towards it, a bare circle in the distance. The lake was between them now, all black water and mounded shapes. “My mother died in there. I have to see.” 

Usopp let her hand go and backed up a step, like he was nervous again. Trying to give her space, except all it'd done was left her cold.

"Then, let's—" said Nami.

Robin started walking, heedless. Her feet pulled her forwards, around trees, around rocks, around crevices until she broke through the brush and land dropped abruptly into lake. 

The water stretched out in front of her, black as night sky and glittering under the moon. Beyond it, the charred remnants of the Tree of Knowledge rose like a broken crown from a haze of shapes— from what Robin now knew to be a forest. Above it, the sky. 

Below it… 

Robin looked down again. There were strange shapes in the lake, mounded like cairns or like islands. The lake had never had islands, though, and there was something familiar about the way they sat, about the lumpy irregularity of them.

She blossomed a line of arms and a single eye to take a look.

And what she found left her blinking at tears all over again.

Books. Hundreds of thousands of books, a thousand years of history, all the contents of Ohara's massive library, the dying wish of Ohara's archaeologists. Clover’s dying wish. Her mother’s. Books. Mounded haphazardly in massive piles, waterlogged, in so many ways desecrated by nature and time and the Buster Call. How brilliant of her teachers, to throw them in the lake.

Only a small percentage of the books would have held together, and of those, so, so few would be legible, and none at all would be completely intact. The loss to the world was still immeasurable.

But they had _survived._

The books, and the trees, and Robin. They had survived. In spite of the world, to spite the world, they had survived. They had survived.

"Ohara lives," said Robin, somewhere between broken laugh and awed whisper. "Ohara _lives._ ”

Again, that gull cried.

Robin was trembling, she realized. With her bloomed hands, she was trying to gather books, but they were shaking too much to get a proper grip. She knocked a volume into the water, instead, and before the splash was even audible she was letting her power go and drawing her arms into her chest. "No!"

Noise, from the crew. Worried chatter. She rocked back and forth on her feet, grabbed tightly at the sides of her shirt, shut her eyes. She had to get herself together, and quickly, or she would ruin what her mother and teachers had given their lives to preserve. She had to make sure Ohara continued living, now that she knew it clung to life. She had to do this _right,_ and her body’s shakiness was an impediment. She had to— 

And then Luffy was there. He barrelled into her, sent her nearly tumbling off the cliff as her eyes flew open. But before they quite fell, he’d stopped moving and wrapped long limbs around her in a suffocating hug and placed his head on her shoulder and the world was paused.

It was warm. He was warm.

“How are you finding Ohara, Luffy?” she asked, as her heart-rate steadied. “Are its ghosts to your liking?”

Luffy looked up at her, frowning just a little. He untangled himself but kept close, kept his eyes on Robin. She wished he would have kept touching her. Her crew was so kind, but they kept letting go and leaving her cold.

Nami said something, back behind her. The breeze rustled the pages of books into a chorus and sent tiny waves skittering across the lake. Certain, the stars shone.

Luffy smiled at her and sat down, cross-legged.

“Robin,” he said, voice soft. “Tell me a story about this place.”

Haltingly, Robin lowered herself to sit beside him. She felt the others back away, just near enough to offer comfort but still far enough to give privacy. Her family was too kind. Her family was too kind.

"A long time ago," she said, and for once did not plan what words would come after, "there was a woman named Nico Olvia, who loved her daughter very much. But she loved history even more."

Luffy’s eyes were wide and dark against the night. They were fixed on her, those eyes that had challenged Emperors and Admirals, those eyes that had seen the World Government’s flag burn. It was not often, that Luffy gave something his full attention.

“She loved history so much that she left her daughter for a journey— and when she came back, there were ships and ships and ships after her, cutting the sea with their wakes, and she held her daughter as she spoke defiance to the world.

“Or: A long time ago, in a world wracked with war, a ship of refugees and books came to this island. They saw a tree so massive it could house a city, so tall it seemed to dwarf even the Red Line, and they said, ‘This will be our home, and this tree will keep for us our knowledge.’”

“Or: A long time ago, the Tree of Knowledge burned.”

“Or:” Luffy’s hands caught hers in their grip.

“Robin,” he said. 

The gull, again.

“Yes?”

“We’ll put our flag here,” he said. The profile of his face was turned up toward the stars, the sharp shadows of it etched in night. “We’ll put our flag here, and Nami’ll draw her map, and everyone’ll know that Ohara’s still alive ‘cause you never died. And ‘cause you want to protect it.”

Robin stared at him, felt his hands around hers, Ohara clinging to life beneath her.

 _She_ knew Ohara lived, the hands and the eyes and the feet of her, and the trees knew, and the books, and the grasses and the fish and the birds knew, and her crew knew. And that would have been enough for her, before everything, but she was a Straw Hat, inevitable and undeniable, and it was only fitting that she ensure the world knew, too. 

It was only right to put Ohara under Luffy’s protection, out of spite and as a promise.

“Thank you for making me live," she said. "Thank you for making me live, and for bringing me home, and for taking me to my dream. Thank you for giving me a family.” She took a shuddering breath of air that smelled nothing like smoke.  
“All of you, thank you for giving me a family.”

And Ohara would fly the Straw Hat flag, alive and kept safe by the Pirate King’s name, and a redwood would grow tall on the Thousand Sunny amidst friends and tangerines, and Ohara would have a page to herself on the first world atlas. And someday, the world would remember her archaeologists without curses, and would chart routes towards her without fear, and there would be a town and a library and a child who loved history laughing on her shores once again.

Ohara lived, and would, despite the world, to spite the world, keep living. Robin lived, and Ohara lived, and trees grew in Nico Olvia’s grave.

And Robin cried, and the crew gathered on her and around her and next to her with their love, and the newborn peace of Ohara spread vast wings and took flight.

**Author's Note:**

> i've had the idea for this fic sitting around since connie fallingwish and i had a conversation about redwood trees sprouting only after wildfires in december 2017, and it finally exists now
> 
> this fic was conceived as part of a series of oneshots where the straw hats visit home after luffy is pirate king. hilariously most of them are supposed to be fun zany pov outsider hours, and this, the first one i've finished, is basically the only exception because robin needed something melancholy instead . i hope you enjoyed it!  
> ohara lives!
> 
> EDIT: the generous and talented scribblurri on twitter did [an art](https://twitter.com/Scribblurri/status/1271268897073754112) for this fic; please go check it out because it's _gorgeous_


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